one
Recently an instagram reel by one Aastha Dhami and one Mohak Papola went viral. Now if the reel was some dance, or joke, I would not be telling you about it.
It was Mohak proposing to Aastha on stage at a Seedhe Maut Concert as one of the biggest rap duos in the world sang for them. And he hadn’t paid them any amount other than the tickets they had already bought. So how did this happen?
Asking. Mohak mailed Seedhe Maut that he wanted to propose to his long term GF during their concert and if they could do something. And Seedhe Maut decided to get them on stage, sing for them as Mohak got on one knee and pop champage as Aastha said yes.
This is yet another story of why asking works. If Seedhe Maut would have said no, well they had nothing to lose. But them saying yes, creates a moment of a lifetime. Crowded concert, your favorite artists performing, champage showering and you are in the limelight starting a new journey
Moral of the story is that weird things happen if you have the courage to ask. If they hadn’t tried contacting Seedhe Maut, this wouldn’t have happened.
Does that mean that every door you knock upon will be answered? Obviously no. But that doesn't mean that we stop knocking on doors. Some will be answered, some won't but the more doors you knock, the more is the likelihood of them being answered.
Two
Question to all my Indian readers: Who is Aryan Brahmin? Also who is Munawar Farooqi?
If you said you didn’t know Aryan but knew Munawar, with the olympics right across the corner, you really should feel somewhat bad.
Aryan Brahmin is India’s hopeful for the first handball gold at Olympics. He has been a consistent member of the Indian handball team, representing the country at the 2022 Asian Men's Youth Handball Championship in Bahrain, 2022 Asian Youth Beach Handball Championship in Iran and 2022 Partille Cup – World of Handball Championship in Sweden.
Munawar Farooqi is a comedian who makes controversial jokes meant to incite divisionalism calling it dark humor. While his jokes are unfunny at best, they are bigoted, classist and hate mongering at worst. He rose to fame after winning Big Boss(a worse version of Big Brother, also with only C-grade celebrities).
Here is a photo of Munawar’s welcome to his home city. This rally which broke down traffic in Bombay(the 12th most valuable city in the world) was done without permit. When charges were pressed, Munawar called this a protest.
Aryan has constantly been succesful in bringing laurels for the nation. He can be considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, player in Indian Handball but he is almost unrecognized, unappreciated and unsupported. Fortunately, Aryan remains unaffected as he doesn’t play handball for recognition, he plays it as it makes him happy and that is what keeps him going.
The moral of this story, life is not fair. You can do your best and succeed, and no one will even bat an eye. And someone can do almost nothing, and they will be heralded. So choose your passions, choose things which make you happy. And don’t compare. Trying to get appreciation and validation from others is the biggest source of unhappiness, avoid it as far as possible.
Three
Finally, we talk about a story of faliure.
Every year in India, over a million high school students sit for the Joint Entrance Examination, or JEE, with the hope of securing admission to a top engineering college. The competition is overwhelmingly intense. Only a tenth of students who take JEE Main qualify for JEE Advanced, and of those who take Advanced, only a 10-15 thousand will actually get seats in the prestigious IITs.
At a utilitarian level, the setup of JEE makes perfect sense. India has more students interested in engineering than the job market can accomodate, so a hyper-competitive exam acts as an efficient filter. Only the very best, as judged by a single test taken on a bright sunny day, move on to the next level.
However, there is a terrible cost to this system. Students spend their entire high school careers in an endless grind of test preparation, skipping out on other activities and experiences. Social lives, hobbies, creativity - all are sacrificed at the altar in expectations of a rank. The amount of stress and pressure placed on students is difficult for adults to comprehend, let alone teenagers to face.
Additionally entrance exam scores have little predictive value. A person's worth cannot be distilled to a number. Yet entrance exam mania convinces students that their entire future is predetermined at age 18 based on a single test. And teens are immature, are impulsive and are short sighted by nature. These exams often serve as a catalyst to push the students feelings and doubts over the edge.
The students are brainwashed by the coachings(say Cram Schools) that every IITian is successful and every non-IITian is not. Afterall, if IIT was not a ticket to success, why would people pay millions of rupees, even borrow to prepare for it?
The second stage of these exams start in 5 days, and so do the decisions from USA and UK Unis come arround this time. So keeping in mind the sheer number of Su***** last time, here is a story I wanted to share.
Who is this man? Most of you may not identify him. So let me tell you ‘bout him, he is Venki Ramkrishnan, the first Indian to win a Nobel prize in chemistry.
Dr. Venki was not accepted to IITs. He was turned away by IISC(Inidian Institue of Science) and IISER(Indian Insitiute of Science Education and Research). His Alma matters, Baroda University, a local university. He moved to USA then. He tried at prestige colleges there. None of the HYPSM(Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT) wanted him so he did his masters at University of San Diego(a local uni again) and then PhD in Ohio. Not a single prestigious institute gave him acceptence, and yet out of sheer dedication to his subject and love of research, he has a Nobel.
Dr. Ramakrishnan could give up at any which point, decide to let the colleges decide that he was a bad chemist. But he didn’t. And so while I hope you score well in any and all tests you give, but if and when you don’t, remember that this is a part of life but you still have life ahead of it, and no one other than you can decide your success.
I really liked the third story.
"Yet entrance exam mania convinces students that their entire future is predetermined at age 18 based on a single test. " So true.